Step 9 Spiritual Awakenings, Numbers 1 and 2

Number 1: After a long spiritual drought over the summer, or so it felt, I learned something new while working Step 9 in September – that my amends to my blood father need only be that I forgive him, period. This does not require that I call him or write him, for direct contact with him usually ends with my being harmed.

This goes well with making amends to myself, that I forgive and love myself first and foremost. Forgiveness, I learned early on in the program, does not mean saying that a behavior was okay, for that is often not the case. Forgiveness instead is letting go of a resentment. We do this for our own serenity which my sponsor tells me is my ultimate goal.

Until this spiritual awakening, that all I need do is forgive (in this particular case), I was having a great deal of trouble understanding how I could feel serene while trying to have a relationship with someone who abandoned me as a child and has continued to repeat that behavior for the last 50 years. Why would I expose myself to someone's abuse if I love myself?

The answer is I wouldn't, and shouldn't.

Number 2: I also learned what loving myself really means - my second spiritual awakening this fall. I'm someone who has fought depression ever since my father first left me. I wrote poetry about death and thought about suicide long before my teen years. That or anger was where I went whenever I experienced the emotional pain of rejection, real or imagined.

I was going there again this fall so used the tools I have learned to keep myself afloat (besides taking medication). First was to have an “attitude of gratitude,” so I made a gratitude list. Okay, that helped me to stop the self-pity, to count my blessings. Second was to get some exercise and sunshine. That helped short-term, but the effects did not last long enough. So third, I thought about others and that I needed to stay alive for them. Anyone who has had a family member or friend commit suicide will tell you to think of others.

This is when I realized that I only felt good when I was either with others or had plans on a daily basis to be with someone else. Should someone cancel our plans, I would be devastated and wonder how I was going to make it through the day. It took me awhile to see this, since my old self felt better when I was alone because people often made me feel bad about myself. That's because my family of origin was non-supportive and I used to choose unhealthy relationships.

That's when it hit me, that if I was going to beat my depression, I was going to have to love myself enough to enjoy my own company. I needed to lose my dependency on others to feel good about me. In other words, staying alive for others was no longer working because it was only a temporary fix – I had to learn to stay alive for me! This is a radical change in my thinking and I have just begun to practice it.

Stay tuned for more blogging on this.

A Balancing Act

Several people commented after my last blog about depression and how recovery itself can also cause fatigue. This is true, and it is at those times that we need to take extra special care of ourselves. I remember when I was deep in the throws of my first real 4th step inventory that I let a lot of stuff go, such as housework and even physical exercise - things I had always made a priority. I needed so badly to get well spiritually that the physical had to take a back seat. (I felt even better about my doing this when I read in Alcoholics Anonymous on page 64 that "we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.")

So this approach seemed to work for me, even though now I do need to exercise in order to keep up my spirits. But that is different than being spiritually well. Spiritually well to me is not always feeling good. Instead, it is knowing that my emotions or how I feel physically don't need to rule my attitude and therefore my life. They simply help me know that something is going on and I need to use the tools of my program to take action, if necessary. And sometimes that action is rest, which I'm pretty much doing today, deciding when I woke up "not quite right" that I would not push myself as much as I have been.

But in this cultural, we are taught to be producers. I remember my youngest daughter coming home from high school during my worst clinical depression more than ten years ago. She asked me what I had accomplished that day, as if that would be a sign that I was better. Funny thing is that the times I was the most productive in my life have not necessarily been the healthiest. I often took up unnecessary projects or pushed myself too hard on household chores just to keep busy, to keep my mind off of what was really bothering me, which was my extreme unhappiness in my marriage to an alcoholic.

So when I stopped putting the physical first to clean out the cobwebs in my soul, to release my spirit and let it shine, I may have not been as productive as I used to be, but I was much happier and so were my children. Even today it is a balancing act, between taking care of the physical and spiritual, emotional and mental. I have to watch myself to make sure I'm not just being lazy when I decide I need a day off. I have to ask my Greater Power what she wants me to do every day. And today that answer seemed to be to rest, even though I had planned on going to the gym. My knee hurting and giving out while climbing the stairs was a real indication.

It is okay, I tell myself. I can go to the gym tomorrow instead. This will give me the chance to catch up with some reading and be more prepared for a writing class I'm starting tonight. Maybe, just maybe, I'll even take a nap which I usually don't do. It's okay. Sometimes the work we talk about in "working the steps" or "working our program" is not work at all, but learning to be comfortable with changing our behavior - for me, Just for Today, that is being flexible with my schedule when my body and mind need some extra rest. Thank you, God, for giving me the time.

When I'm Tired...

I've been extra tired lately. At first, I thought it was the time change. Then I remembered that I was tired before the time change. Second, I thought is was traveling, but then I remembered that I wasn't excited about taking our two-week camping trip last month. Perhaps the real reason was that I was tired.

Am I still so out of touch with my needs that I couldn't figure that out then and do something about it rather than "suffer" for a month? Maybe it just takes a lot of years to overcome old behavior - thinking that being tired is normal when all of my life it was a symptom of depression.

So I "woke up" enough today to call my doctor and get some help. Maybe next time I'll "wake up" sooner and realize that I shouldn't feel tired when I'm getting enough sleep, not overdoing it, and otherwise taking care of myself. Maybe next time, I'll remember this time.

Dealing with Depression

Along with being an Al-Anon, I fight depression. Not the kind that comes from dealing with alcoholism and other family/relationship dysfunctions, but the kind that comes from an inherited chemical imbalance. I can usually tell when it's coming, and more often than not, I usually just have to let it, because I know that "This too shall pass." I am powerless.

That doesn't mean that I need to become depression's victim, letting it drag me down to despair and complete escapism. Instead, I recognize it, do what I can do to alleviate its symptoms, and leave the results to time. I know, for example, that some physical exercise will help, even though my brain tells me to crawl back into bed or onto the couch. I also know that getting out of the house will help, to be out in the world even though I don't want to deal with anyone or anything. So I plan on going somewhere, even if it's the grocery store. I go through the motions of normalcy and these help.

It also helps to make a gratitude list as well as list my good qualities. This is not a good time to do a 6th step, dredging up my character defects. That list, when I'm depressed, is already present in my mind and much longer than the one my sponsor and I made during my last 5th step. In fact, during my last 5th step, my sponsor also made me list 10 good character traits. She said it was like pulling teeth because I've spent so much time in my life letting depression get the best of me.

And since that 5th step, my Greater Power has been showing me that I am indeed lovable and worthy of love, and I have many people in my life who not only love me, but like me as well. In fact, just writing this post is helping me realize that. I'm already feeling better because I'm doing something positive. I am taking part in changing my attitude and something is clicking inside my brain. Everything may not be okay, but I will be okay. I've probably been through the worst of it this morning (after a week of knowing it was coming) and like fog, my depression will lift as the day goes on...

If I let it, if I "Let Go and Let God."

GETTING UNSTUCK

How do I know my life is unmanageable? Well, yesterday and today, I got stuck simply because a loved one in my life seems stuck. For me, that means I'm depressed about someone else's problem rather than living my own life. I'm stuck waiting until that person's life moves forward before mine can. In effect, that person has become my Higher Power for the moment.

I need not be in this place. I have choices. I can do some Christmas shopping, or just wrap the presents I already have. I can go for a walk. I can go to a movie. I can blog. The key is to get moving, without getting involved in solving someone else's problem. Unless of course they ask for help and it is appropriate that I help. So this is my start to GETTING UNSTUCK...

Pausing to Ponder...

The poem in my first posting may never be read by its recipient. He doesn't know I'm in Al-Anon, and unless he responds to my latest invitation to see me when I'll be only 35 miles from his home next weekend, we will probably never meet again... This is one of those cases where we do what we can to make our amends, to make up for our shortcomings, but leave the results to our Higher Power... for we are powerless over the insidious disease of alcoholism and its behavior in other people. We can only change our own attitudes and consequent behaviors.

I have decided to share my story in this format, as anonoymously as possible, in order to pass on the Al-Anon program to anyone who has already discovered its rewards and anyone out there who is still suffering from having lived with the disease of alcoholism in a relative or friend. My plan is to share my program backwards, from where I am now to where I was, inserting what happened in the middle. This doesn't mean that I am completely recovered. Far from it. I have simply reached a mountain top this month where I believe I am finally letting go of the original resentment in my life - of my father for having abandoned me as a child and for continually abandoning me as an adult.

Many women out there have been damaged by their relationship with their father. If a little girl doesn't have a loving one, she is often prone to pick men who treat her the same way her father did or a man, she thinks, who will replace the loving father she did not have. I did just that. My pick was an alcoholic. We have been married many years, and I found Al-Anon a long time before he found Alcoholics Anonymous. My program helped me to be content whether the alcoholic was still drinking or not. But just as my spouse's drinking no longer made me miserable, his sobriety did not make me deliriously happy. In fact, the opposite seemed to happen. I truly realized that my happiness depended on my relationship with my Higher Power and my own behavior - my relationship with myself and how I treated other people through my thoughts and actions.

I came to understand that I still held deep resentments that were clogging my soul. In Al-Anon, we talk about peeling the onion - peeling off the layers of resentments we have built up against people who have harmed us, some significant, others a lot less so, everyone from the person who cut us off in traffic to that parent who failed to nurture us. I've been peeling my onion for years, working the 12 steps of the Al-Anon program and giving back to Al-Anon through volunteer work and helping others work the steps. But I never really got to the core of my onion until this year. Oh, I've gotten close before, but I immediately covered it up with new, fresh resentments in order to avoid the fumes with the potential to poison me for the rest of my life. This is called denial, and I was denying that my father abandoning me was a resentment I had not yet exorcised.

This spring and summer, the time had come. My body was beginning to feel the effects of this powerful resentment. It was as if I'd gone through rolfing to rid myself of the emotional pain and the result was the pain coming to the surface where I could actually feel it, yet it has yet to be released. Some days, I can hardly walk, my hips and knees hurt so much. I got some relief this summer, but only because I escaped into depression for a few months. Depression, for me, is not only anger turned inwards, but denial of the destructive nature of resentments - not harming the resentee, but the resenter. Depression for me is tuning out, wanting to escape, contemplating a way out of the misery that is my inner life.

But after getting help for the depression, when it lifted, the pain came back. And no medication or massage seemed to aleviate it. In fact, I am still suffering some as I write this, for this exercise is part of my releasing it to the universe, asking my Higher Power to take it from me. I am still wondering what the outcome will be of my reaching out to my father one last time. I stilll want to control the situation, or to react to it rather than respond to it. I still want to get angry, to lash out, to complain to others, to wail and bemoan my horrible childhood, to exaggerate the awful things my father has said and done to me. In other words, I still want to drown in the problem rather than swim in the solution. Why? Because it is familiar; it is what I have been doing since I was seven years old, since the day my father left.

Yet it is time. Time to let go of my original resentment. The resentment that turned me into an angry, hardened, I-can-do-it-by-myself, leave-me-alone, little girl who grew up to be the typical Al-Anon, bouncing back and forth between the extremes of burning bridges to building them with I'll-do-anything-for-you-just-don't-leave-me! I have just recently learned that I don't have to leave yet another job because everyone there isn't perfect, and I can't seem to be perfect there either. I can work through the problems by fixing myself and my behavior, with the help, of course and always, of my Higher Power. I don't have to participate in the gossip and griping. Neither do I have to be the victim of such. I can look at my own behavior, correct and make amends, if necessary, and then establish my boundaries. If someone crosses them, I let them know as graciously as possible.

I'm working through the same type of situation in a family relationship. These problems are helping me to be true to myself while not rejecting and condeming others. They are helping me to put into practice the principles we learn in the Al-Anon program by working the 12 steps. We sometimes call this awareness, acceptance, and action. I am in the action stage, at least in the aforementioned relationships and certainly in one of my oldest relationships, that with my father. Although I don't feel like I've taken much action since there is no response from him and therefore no interaction, which has been the case most of my life, beginning with the almost total lack of correspondence for 12 years, and no connection either by phone or in person during that time...

Yet I have taken action. I have sliced into the core of my onion and its poison is seeping out through my muscles, slowly but surely. It is almost gone. I can tell because it isn't as deep. It is more on the surface. Often, just the warm touch from my hand can relieve the pain. All I have to do is remember to touch where I hurt rather than feel the kind of self-pity that says, "This will always hurt, this will only get worse and worse, I am doomed to a life of pain..." I am not. I have learned that. I've lived with the chaos of alcoholism and learned to be content and even happy. I can certainly do the same with this original resentment. I only have to be willing to let my Higher Power take it from me. That doesn't mean it is instantaneous. It is too old and I've held it so deep inside me, that even a supernatural healing takes time and causes pain, like surgery of a deeply imbedded tumor which affects all the nerves and organs around it.

And feeling the pain of its release also serves to teach me to not take it back, ever. To right now know that once it is gone, I can finally begin to become the loving, kind, creative, humble, and authentic person I was meant to be - before I reacted so harshly to my father leaving. And my mother's hurt clouding her ability to be an emotionally available parent. But that is for another blog, another day. Today I am releasing by reaching out to any reader out there the seriousness of what can happen when we hang on to our resentments. They will kill us one way or another. I have a choice here. I can walk upright with no pain or I can hobble to a drugstore and buy myself a cane. My Higher Power and the Al-Anon program and all it offers can be my "crutch" or I can work my way towards needing a walker or wheelchair long before I am an old woman. I've seen it around me. I feel it happening to me. And I choose to not take that path.

I choose health - beginning with my spiritual health which helps heal the emotional, mental, and physical health. I chose this week to contact my father with an invitation to meet with me. We haven't seen each other since his mother's funeral, which I took the time to travel to to be with him and my brother and pay my respects to the grandmother I hardly knew... The last time we saw each other before that was eight years ago. My spouse and I stopped over for a few days on our way to another destination. My father told me that because our trip wasn't solely to visit him, our stopping over did not count. Yet he has not made any attempt to come visit me, my spouse, or my children, not in 13 years. Yes, he is a very sick man. He was damaged as a child, by an alcoholic, and has not received the gift of recovery that I have. Thus, it is up to me to make one more, for my sake, attempt to see him.

After this, I am through, unless by some miracle my father sees his part and makes his amends. I can no longer participate in this one-way relationship. My counselor has told me to consider emotional divorce. To stop sending birthday, Christmas, and Father's Day cards. After all, this father did not raise me. He even easily gave up his rights as a parent when my step-father adopted me. So I had a daddy of sorts, although not the real deal. He loved my mother, and so tolerated me. I was not an easy child to be around and for many years as an adult, I was hostile and unyielding, spewing out hateful words and blaming everyone but myself for my problems and lack of love in my life. Yet he never gave up on me and always left the door open, even visiting me and my children, his grandchildren, along with my mother, who also had every reason to reject me, unlike my blood father whose reason for rejecting me was his own guilt of falling in love with another woman and parenting her children....

So I've told you enough. I've typed enough this cool fall morning. I am so grateful it is fall, my favorite time of year. Even when there are so many painful anniversaries this month, I can be happy. Perhaps that is why my Higher Power has given me the desire and the tools through the Al-Anon program to take care of my core resentment this month, by attending a family wedding only 50 miles away from my father. I'm leaving it up to him whether or not to drive the 50 miles to see me. It is, at this point, his choice. The proverbial ball is in his court, once more. However, if he takes any cheap shots, as he often has in the past, I can leave the game. And it won't be as a sore loser. It will be as a healthy adult who is willing to play fairly but not put up with being bullied anymore. I'm suddenly feeling light. My hips no longer hurt like they did when I woke up this morning. This can only be a God-thing. Thank you for listening...